There was no debate. As the Wall Street Journal (and numerous other publications) points out, a group of beurocrats with their own and their party's interests in mind sat down and negotiated the bill.
"The final terms of a stimulus plan will be hammered out by a conference among House and Senate leaders, who will bargain over how to reconcile competing Senate and House versions of the plan."
They chose a very appropriate word there. "Bargain." We no longer debate. We bargain.
As for the rest of congress -- Like I said, there was not a final draft of the bill available until less than 24 hours before the voting took place. And I didn't say this was limited to Republicans. I said "the whole of the house."
Regardless, even if every representative could have gotten a copy of the bill to review, you're being quite unrealistic to state that simply having staffers is enough to read, research and comprehend 1100 pages of law and all of the associated bills referenced within in less than 24 hours. Let alone debate it in any publicly visible forum.
The only so-called "debate" that you could possibly be inferring is the media's vague talking points on the bill. But even then the media spent most of it's time on biased opinion-presented-as-journalism nonsense. The leftist media praising the bill and calling the right idiots for questioning anything about it, and the right media playing along, focusing on the name calling and "those evil Democrats."
The reality is that the last thing any of the House and Senate leaders want is debate. Debate just gets in the way of "bypartisianship" laws chock full of goodies that can bragged about on the pulpit next election cycle. The economic downturn was simply a great opportunity to use FUD as an excuse to rush through billions in spending without review.
Cynical? Sure. But that is the state of things and anyone not blinded by party bias can see that.
And for what it's worth, stop playing and feeding the damn blame game. This isn't about Democrats vs Republicans. It's about our government out of control, government involvement being largely responsible for the mess we're in, and more government being far, far from an appropriate or effective solution.
Read the bill in its final form here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ARRA_public_review/